In 2005, my new husband carried me over the threshold of our new home in a family-oriented subdivision just off Latson Road in Howell. We were excited about our new community — the small-town feel, the location, the people. It never occurred to us to worry about bullets raining down through our roof.
And yet — on New Year’s Day, just after midnight as we settled down to sleep over the noise of fireworks and celebratory gunshots — that’s exactly what happened. A huge crash, sounding exactly like a shelf falling over and its contents breaking, jarred us from our beds. I ran through the house, looking for a mess that did not materialize. Tired, we figured we would find it the next day, and left it as a mystery.
Now imagine, reader, stumbling into your bathroom bleary-eyed with sleep around 6 a.m. after having stayed up quite late (and you are … not 20 anymore). Is that … powdered sugar on your floor? And something shiny? Have the children been sneaking weird sweets into the bathroom?
But that shiny thing is metal. And that powdered sugar … is drywall dust?
With still no coffee in my system, I assumed something in the house had broken and a structural item had fallen onto my floor. Until I picked up the metal and realized what it was. Or, rather, since I’m not a gun owner, did a reverse-image search to confirm that what I was holding was, indeed, a discharged bullet. In my home.
Howell is not the inner city, rife with gang violence. And my husband — a Dale Carnegie sales manager — and I — a librarian at Oakland University — don’t have any outstanding death threats of which we are aware. The police asked us about that, sureally.
The key, here, is the celebratory gunshots.
What gun owners in the area apparently do not realize is that what goes up must come down, and as it is coming down it gains momentum. My PhD-in-progress is in educational leadership, so my understanding of physics is hazy at best, but it has something to do with terminal velocity, the angle at which the bullet is fired, and the size of the bullet. A bullet descending to the earth will not have the force it does right out of the gun, but it still packs a punch; in this case, it was enough to come crashing through my roof, my attic, and into my bathroom.
And we were lucky.
On the same day, two men in West Michigan, David Reed, 35, and Jason McCreary, 40, were killed by bullets that had been shot off to announce the New Year by a 62-year-old man who is now starting his year off with murder charges.
Deaths, or property damage from falling bullets, are common, and every year around the Fourth of July and New Years, various agencies beg people to not shoot off their guns. I can’t bring myself to think about what could have happened if one of my children had been in that bathroom.
My husband and I are beginning 2023 with bills that we certainly didn’t need in order to fix the hole in our roof. Finding the gun that shot our bullet, as it didn’t result in a casualty, is not going to happen — bullets can travel quite far, and it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. We live in an area with a lot of gun owners though, and it is imperative that those gun owners behave responsibly, especially in residential areas.
Unfortunately the safety zone around buildings, a law that limits where bullets can be fired in relation to homes, only applies to active hunting. Perhaps that should be changed, because common sense certainly is not occurring when people get the celebratory spirit into them.
You own a gun and want to make a little noise to announce how excited you are about the holiday? Please, for everyone’s sake, don’t.
Or choose blanks.
